If Elected, Moderate Mitt Will Disappear

Oct. 26 (Bloomberg) -- You have to hand it to Mitt Romney
and his team. Starting in the first debate, he pivoted almost
effortlessly to the center, which is where elections are won. If
he beats President Barack Obama, it will be because he Etch-A-Sketched his earlier positions and convinced enough people that
he would be a moderate president.

Unfortunately, he has little chance of governing that way.
We don’t know which Romney will show up on a given day, but we
sure know which Republican Party would be in charge in
Washington every minute. The Republicans have become the most
extreme major political party in generations. They are
tolerating Romney’s heresies this month only to gain power.

If a President Romney tried to govern in a moderate fashion
by, say, allowing for some revenue increases to reduce the
deficit, his base wouldn’t hesitate to savage him. Then he would
be a man without a party, unless you include Senator Susan
Collins of Maine. Were Senator Scott Brown to survive his
challenge in Massachusetts (and Elizabeth Warren currently leads
in the polls), the moderate Republican caucus in Congress might
include just two senators, plus three or four House members.
That’s it.

More likely, Romney as president would be a man with a
strange crick in the neck, constantly looking over his right
shoulder to see which pickup truck full of movement
conservatives was about to run him over.

Deviating Republicans

If you think he has the fortitude to stand up to people
such as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist and Senator Jim
DeMint of South Carolina, who never hesitate to knife fellow
Republicans for deviations, you haven’t been paying attention.
Fortitude, constancy, commitment to a set of ideas -- these
aren’t likely to be the hallmarks of a Romney administration.

So we would have a president constantly buffeted by his
base, which is far out of the mainstream. The events of this
fall offer proof that Republicans hold extreme views that aren’t
shared by most Americans. Otherwise, Romney would have been
honest about his program and championed conservative issues
instead of executing all those U-turns in the debates.

His real blueprint for governing, readily available from
his public statements throughout the campaign, is almost
completely at odds with the image he has sought to project
before the huge audience of centrist voters who pay little
attention to politics.

Instead of “loving regulation,” as he said in the first
debate, a President Romney would gut what he called the
“extreme” fuel-economy standards that are helping America move
toward energy independence; repeal the Volcker rule and other
sensible efforts to prevent another financial crisis; and relax
emission rules for coal-fired plants, among hundreds of other
favors for wealthy interests. Carte blanche for business is the
soul of his otherwise soul-less campaign.

In all three debates, Romney also claimed to “love”
teachers and education. But as governor of Massachusetts, he
slashed funding for the community colleges that train the
middle-class workforce of the future. His election would end
Obama’s only-Nixon-could-go-to-China progress on getting
Democrats to sign on to his Race to the Top accountability
standards for schools. Divided Democrats would unite to oppose
Romney, dealing a severe setback to education reform. That’s why
reformers such as Michelle Rhee and many of the hedge-fund
managers bankrolling charter schools are strongly pro-Obama.

Budget Cuts

While Romney claimed in Denver to oppose cuts in Pell
grants, the budget proposed by his running mate, Representative
Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, plans 33 percent less for “education,
training, employment and social services.” An additional 6
percent would be cut from “general science, space and basic
technology” -- a gut punch to the research institutions that are
critical for a 21st-century economy.

Repealing Obama’s Affordable Care Act would mean people
like my 18-year-old daughter, who has a serious pre-existing
condition, will have trouble getting insured. Cutting $750
billion from Medicaid and block-granting it would lead to more
sick, uninsured Americans going to the doctor later than they
should, and to the closure of many inner-city hospitals and
clinics. And that’s just part of more than $1 trillion in cuts
to spending for the needy. There’s nothing moderate about Ryan’s
plan to shred the social safety net.

Might President Romney tell Vice President Ryan he’s all
wet? Don’t bet on it. No one in Washington thinks Romney would
shelve the very document that helped convince him to put Ryan on
the ticket in the first place. More likely, he would assign Ryan
responsibility for supervising his budget.

Let’s say Romney and the Democrats split the difference and
cut only 16 percent from education instead of 33 percent, or
increase defense spending by only $1 trillion instead of $2
trillion. In what way is that moderate?

In the negotiations over the so-called fiscal cliff,
President Romney would be trapped between anti-tax zealots who
think they won the election, and deficit hawks willing to raise
revenue to close the deficit. The whip hand that Obama has with
the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts is much more likely to
yield a workable compromise.

Then there’s the Supreme Court. Should a vacancy occur
(Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a survivor of pancreatic cancer,
is 79), Romney would be compelled to nominate an abortion foe or
suffer the wrath that conservatives inflicted on President
George W. Bush when he tried to name Harriet Miers to the court.

That would mean a reversal of Roe v. Wade and a return of
abortion policy to the states, many of which would ban
terminating pregnancies.

To judge by the Boca Raton, Florida, debate this week,
Romney’s foreign policy would resemble Obama’s. He claimed
repeatedly to agree with the president, even arguing that he
would tap global bodies such as the United Nations. So why is
Romney surrounded by neoconservatives from the Bush
administration who despise the UN and still believe the Iraq War
was a good idea?

Obama won the second and third debates by calling Romney
out on his Extreme Makeover. His best line was when he charged
that Romney wanted to return to the foreign policies of the
1980s, the social policies of the 1950s and the economic
policies of the 1920s.

Secret wars, back-alley abortions, cowboy capitalism. How
moderate.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the
author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions
expressed are his own.)